December2008

IIT Kharagpur Alumni Association, Kolkata is organizing a Contributory day trip on Steamer from Babughat and return. We invite alumni from ALL the IITs to join us and bring your family and friends for a day of fun and games on the River Hooghly . — BUT do please confirm your attendance as early as possible:

NOTE : Seats are limited and per person charges will be higher by Rs. 50/- after JAN 10, 2009.

What: Steamer Trip
When: Sunday , January 18, 2009, From 9 am to 4pm
Where: From Babughat and return sailing along the Hooghly river

New Delhi, Dec. 24: All current IIT directors were appointed by a process violating at least some of the laws cited by Madras High Court yesterday in setting aside the re-appointment of IIT Madras chief M.S. Ananth.

Human resource development ministry documents accessed by The Telegraph reveal that the government never issued public notices inviting applications for the posts of directors, barring in IIT Bombay, to the institutes when they last fell vacant.

Article 16 of the Constitution states that “there shall be equality of opportunity for all citizens in matters relating to employment or appointment to any office under the state”. Article 14 refers to equal opportunities to all citizens.

The high court cited these articles yesterday while declaring illegal the appointment of Ananth for a second term in 2007.

“It is rather shocking that no public notice was given, no advertisement was given in newspapers for the post of director, thus violating Articles 14 and 16 of the Constitution,” the court had said.

Raj Shekhar Singh (Kgp B.Tech, 2009, Biotech, RK) spent 8-weeks at UC Berkeley in the summer of 2008. He worked with Dr. Norm Miller, a principal investigator in the Energy Biosciences Institute, on biofuels research. As a result of Raj’s experience, Dr. Miller has agreed to collaborate with Dr. Prasanta Sanyal in the Geology/Geophysics department at IIT Kharagpur.

This is an excellent example of how the collaboration is poised to enable IIT Kharagpur students and faculty to work with leading researchers and
world-class research infrastructure. The collaboration has the potential of also being a catalyst in accelerating new knowledge creation, and bringing new discoveries and innovation to the society. In this way IIT Kharagpur can further enhance and differentiate its value in India and around the world. Therefore, we believe that UC Berkeley-IIT Kharagpur collaboration is an important part of building IIT Kharagpur for the 21st
Century.

The key components of the collaboration include:

8-week summer research program for 12-16 IIT Kharagpur undergraduate students at UC Berkeley

At the ongoing pan-IIT meet in Chennai, noted economist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen urged IITians to address glaring inequalities in the Indian society:

The fact that there were more malnourished children in South Asia than those in Africa was an illustration of a big failure on the part of the system which had produced other successes.

Dr. Sen thematically addressed all issues with an illustration of classical Indian legal literature. “Nyaya” and “Neeti” were usually both translated as “justice.” But “nyaya” represented justice through realisation based on actual outcomes, “neeti” was based on the application of existing rules of behaviour. This dichotomy was echoed in the system-driven justice notions of Hobbes and Kant on the one hand, and outcome-driven notions of Condorcet and Rawls on the other.

Many projects in India were not able to attain their objectives due to focus on the “neeti” type of argument, with the phrase “I did my best [within the rules]” sufficing to explain away failure. What was required to eliminate the inequities in the Indian system was to focus on working towards achieving specific goals within the pragmatic “nyaya” framework, and this was within the capabilities of the IIT system, Dr. Sen said.
…
To this end, IITs could contribute by infusing their culture of engineering focussed on solving particular problems, he said.